There was some work underway on supporting Blueray... and I believe the basic capability is in the current release if the you choose it during setup. Do a search of the forum/wiki and you see some useful info.

I have personally never used it though so I will leave it to others to fill in the gap in my statement here ;-)

In short, Blu-Ray support on Linux is fairly limited. There was some work and good progress early on but from what I can tell there hasn't been any forward progress in a while. Whether or not Linux, and therefore LinuxMCE, can rip a Blu-Ray disk (required before you can play it) depends on the type and version of protection. I haven't been following it very closely lately, but as far as I know the only reliable way to get blu-ray movies into LinuxMCE is to rip them on a windoze box using AnyDVD and copy the ripped movie over.

I have a blu-ray drive and one movie I bought to test. Unfortunately that movie isn't supported so I can't verify, but as I understand it if you have a supported movie and the add-on software for LMCE all you have to do is put the movie in and tell it to rip. Once done, it's in your library ready to be watched.

edit: I almost forgot. If you have a PS3 running Linux, supposedly it's fairly easy to dump a movie to the hard drive on the PS3 then boot into Linux and copy it to another box.

The PS3 only enables getting the disc image it does nothing for decrypting. the resulting ps3 image still needs to be processed through anydvd. So if you have a Blu-ray drive the ps3 is not required.

linuxmce uses aaskeys and hddump and doesn't seem to work on the blu-ray discs i have tried.

good luck

Grrrr, I didn't know that. I don't have a PS3, but I've considered getting one for BD support and the occasional game. If it doesn't make it any easier to rip movies to LMCE then it just lost a big chunk of it's appeal for me.

I'm very anti-piracy anti-drm, and all this protection BS makes me want to go pirate movies. I refuse to pay for AnyDVDHD or PowerDVD or any other utility just so I can play the movies I bought on the player I bought, but I may swap my BD drive from my core with the DVD drive in my desktop and start digging through google to find a solution. I know there are firmware patches to LG drives to get the volume ID without a licensed player using a windoze utility that runs under wine. That may be enough, when combined with other programs, to allow BD rips under Linux and wine.

Please refer back to my comment on the difficulties of playing back blu-ray discs under Linux.

To be more to your point, they haven't rolled in blu-ray support to Medibuntu. Please guys, think before you speak.

-Thom

I agree with Thom in that this topic has been beaten to death. If blu-ray is what you seek, try the Oppo. It can be controlled via the serial port, but you may need to create a template if one doesn't already exist.

I do have it playing on my mythbuntu install and am very happy with it so far.

Its up to the developers to support blueray and in time as it becomes more mainstream in linux, I am sure they will. Anybody that asked the questions about this topic, Please keep asking ( or search forums ) more interest shown will promote somebody to work on it.

I would love to see blue-ray support available in Linux, as I believe that as a consumer you should have a right to choose your own players if you rightly purchase the disc, I am also of the view, that piracy can be managed in a way to be able to enjoy blue-ray playback in any players - I for one will allow authentication of my disk through the player to the studios server with my permission with success I get full 1080p without I get SD, additional benefit they can get information to target me like what amazon does. What would be a nice option like in windows, if you have a complaint graphics card, and hooked up to hdmi port, you can play blue-ray; but again the software would require keys, they would never allow that for xine.

To my comment, I believe the simple action of discussing decrypting blue-ray as tschak909 indicating can put this project in trouble with the law, my suggestion, yes you want the 1080 p quality because you have that HD tv, but until you, we, can play blue-ray in Linux - hopefully legally - just buy dvd's, you send the message were it hurts.

DMCA style copyright legislation is not yet in place in Canada and fair-use allows (currently) for backing up of media for a variety of reasons. DMCA style copyright legislation has recently been re-introduced here and there are significant concerns about the limitations that it would impose. I understand that circumventing DRM/copy protection is illegal in many places, the DMCA heavily emphasises this. DMCA recently allows circumventing for specific (very limited, usually research) purposes but continues to criminalise distributing and acquiring the tools to circumvent. Significant legal problems would arise, in countries implementing DMCA style legislation, if LMCE were to implement circumvention functionality, or even permit a discussion about the methods to circumvent.

This question (not only this one) comes up frequently enough that there must be a vast gaping hole in the information new users see when they arrive at the forums. We don't have a 'START HERE' post with an FAQ like most other forums I visit. I wonder if a general sticky message at the top of the user forum with a 'READ THIS FIRST' kinda subject and a body including links to the main LMCE web page, wiki pages (especially FAQ), why no blu-ray, blah, blah would be a useful tool in heading off some of the repetitive new user questions... Yes I know most of the info is on the wiki, but until you read through 50 random posts or more there is no link to the wiki from the forum and no FAQ guide here either. If nothing else it may help reduce Thom's irritation/stress levels with recurring questions on the forums.